Greedy Goblin

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Moar l33t PvP: solo capital kill

The Chimera was sitting on the undock. The only question was if my skillz are l33t enough to overcome its shield recharge rate. Luckily they were:

As soon as it was damaged, it self-destructed, as you can see from the point of view of the pilot:

You can see the welfare window popping up for the "victim". The insurance system makes the cost of the kill to be about 1/3 of the kill report value, so I only had to pay this amount to Parasoja who provided the Chimera:

I hope this display of l33tness proved everyone that "elite PvP" is a joke and anyone and his mother can make awesome killmails. But I think there are still some delusional ones who think they can gain respect and prestige for doing something trivial as killing pixel spaceships. For them, I'm planning some even more l33t solo kill. For this I have to finish training for a dreadnought because I doubt if my Tengu can break the shield recharge of that ship. But soonTM I'll provide you the killmail that most PvP-ers are only dreaming to get on, even as a 0.1% damage killmail whore. And I'll have it solo.

PS: as a bonus I got the following mail:

I have no idea where they found the kill report. I was tempted to make up some "l33t" story to have a good laugh on the news site, but then I realized that it's another proof how seriously people take "l33t killz". I mean she had to dig the killboard for solo kills and ask for interview on the ones that look "l33t". I hope that reading this story and its predecessor will show her (and to you) that kills aren't newsworthy. Anyone can make them. Even a "highsec carebear" like myself.

PS2: I think, this kill on the other hand is genuine. I doubt if this amount of stupid can be faked.

For me, the story behind a killmail has always been the thing that matters. Why it happened, who did what where, how long they stalked it, how much effort and preparation went into it, what kind of hilarious idiocy-fail was involved. That’s the bigger game. Think of it as a boss kill, except it only happens once, it has an unique strategy, and an unique story behind it. Without it is meaningless. Sure the TMC writers like writing about cool STORIES around interesting KMs. They probably scan EVEKill for such kills then ask the parties involved about what exactly happened. If the story is interesting, they publish it. So?

"L33t PvP" is in itself and ironic troll propaganda, mostly propagated by goons&co. Everybody knows that killboard stats don't mean anything. Few people obsess about raw killboard stats, and those that do are relentlessly mocked and then get their ass whooped. If someone is faking large amounts of kills to claim "look at us, we are l33tpvp" they would be instantly found out and laughed out of NPC 0.0. Ok people whore on mails, smart bomb blues, troll on forums and the emperor has no clothes. So what else is new?

I believe the only "legitimately" Gevlon hate would be that of "technical PvP". This is where we are talking about stuff as deep knowledge of tracing, optimal, overheating, modules, ship capabilities, all game mechanics. The kind of high end PvP you see at the AT. To people who view this sort of skill as the only form of PvP, yes, you probably would cut it in a trick 1 v 1 (unless you learn and practice that kind of stuff).

But the problem transcends all this. Get it through your thick green head, EVE is a sandbox, where anyone can create and define his own game and rules and victory conditions, and ALL are valid forms of gameplay in this CONTEXT, that's EVE's thing. F1 monkeying in a Drake at 2Am local time, supercap clashes, collapsing alliances by espionage, trick triage tactics in Wormhole space, mining interdictions in hisec, high end AT "arena" - they are all VALID forms of PvP, VALID forms of GAMEPLAY. It's the beauty of the sandbox. Now if someone says your form of "PvP" is illegitimate/inferior/notPvP, but mine is, they are being close minded, incapable of seeing the full breadth of the sandbox (you are here too by the way). Ok, good for them, I see zero value in trying to convince them otherwise (yes, undergeared in WoW was different). I don’t understand your need to convince and demonstrate and change sheeples’ minds.

So yes, killboard stats and "l33tpvp" are bullshit, I know that, and so does anyone with enough braincells to process this. So what exactly are you proving here? If you are trying to silence the semi-literate forum troll armies at EVE24 and elsewhere - well, I find it surprising that you let yourself trolled into doing that.

All it proved is that you can pay someone to make a silly killmail (which I don't think anyone really disputes). That does not render all killmails to be a joke. Go beat up a 5 year old kid, that wouldn't render all boxing matches to be a joke. Go pay Manchester United a couple of million to let you and your friends beat them in an exhibition match, that wouldn't render all soccer (football) matches to be a joke.

You just spent some isk to prove a silly point that no one really disputes all while failing to show anything meaningful.

You can fool people with staged fights of course, but you can't fool yourself. The moment you get into a real fight with someone who presents a real threat, you'll die hilariously. Will your "padded killboard" and staged fights matter then? Nope - you will be just another dead rookie.

@Jim L: with the rate how staged match creators and dope users are caught around sports, I'd dare to say it's a joke. Lance Armstrong made a 10-year long winning streak as a "joke".

@Last Anonymous: you forgot that I flied with HBC fleets for three months. I didn't lose a single ship and seen 3 regions and a dozen supers fall. Of course those fights were "blobs" by the definitions of "l33t PvPers".

@IO: the "scientific" about it is the easyness. I'm honestly surprised by the fact that 1B ISK kill cost only 350M.

@Steel: you are right that you can play any way you want. If you enjoyed a fight, good for you. My point is that it doesn't create bragging right due to being easily cheated. If you didn't want to brag, you have no reason to care.

@Jim L: with the rate how staged match creators and dope users are caught around sports, I'd dare to say it's a joke. Lance Armstrong made a 10-year long winning streak as a "joke".

Association Fallacy. You assert that lance armstrong is a drug cheat and a sportsman therefore all sportsmen are drug cheats.

Your analogy here only serves to prove what others are saying - just because YOU created a bogus kill mail is not evidence that the practice is prevalent.

@IO: the "scientific" about it is the easyness. I'm honestly surprised by the fact that 1B ISK kill cost only 350M.

Simplicity does not equal proof. I think you are misapplying occam's razor here. It is not enough that the theory be the simplest, it must be the simplest which satisfies the conditions. To claim that because it is simple to do that everyone is doing it (as is the subtext in this and your other post) is not only patently wrong but intellectually dishonest.

The point is, if you measure your performance by some killboard stat - the most effective way to achieve that is to earn lots of ISK and then do whatever is needed for your stat using your alts, renting services of others etc.

So, if you are braging about your skills based on some killboard stat... That just makes no sense.

Anyway, I think if killboards are removed all together (i.e. CCP removes some API which validates that) - that might lead to more "purpose" in pvp, so it is done for something that has a meaning, instead of being "leet" which is purely based on some stat, which might be easily skewed.

I think all you are proving is that it's time to find a new game to play. You were bored with WoW and came to EVE as it looked to be a harder challenge. You made lot of ISK too easily. In your mind, you beat EVE, but only economically. Most people don't respect you for that, so you set out to prove you can win at other aspects. You are desperately casting about to find respect. You fly with TEST to "grind sov in 3 regions!!!," but earned no respect even after paying them billions for the privilege. You grew bored with the lack of attention flying with the New Order. Even after your billions donation, you got a whole sentence of mention in miner bumping blog. You got frustrated receiving no respect from the PVPers even after ganking 52B solo. Poor Goblin sitting on the ground holding your head; great big tears on your big green cheeks...pouting, "I can't earn no m-----f-----g credit!" You are earning plenty of pity now. So now you seek to discredit the respect that everyone else has earned.

Save your sanity. Go find another game to conquer in your own mind. Your desperation and failed ridiculous "experiments" are making it more and more unlikely that you will ever receive the respect in EVE that you obviously crave.

@Mordis: the whole blog is about ignoring such social features as "respect". My point always was to prove that ANY goal can be most easily earned by thinking economically. And it seem to work as even the most "skill-based", direct PvP can be beaten by ISK.

Actually mordis mydaddy is quite right - you should listen to him. What we all are trying to say to you is exactly the opposite of what you are trying to accomplish. You can't "win" pvp by ISK. All your posts just prove that, despite you wanting them to prove otherwise. What exactly did you accomplish? That you can have a ton of expensive ganks on mining barges? We know that and no one considers it real pvp, even Goons - the masters of ganks. So next you showed that you can win staged fights. Well, we know staged fights can be won. But you never ever have shown real pvp fights, yet you are constantly begging people to consider you a pvper (in your own way by trying to diminish others). If you want to be considered a pvper, maybe a good pvper some day, stop with those nonsense experiments and do some f***** pvp already! Grab a frig, go to lowsec and shoot stuff. Take aim to have fun doing it, not to grind some useless numbers. This isn't wow where people are judged by them. That's why you have all this negative feedback. If you continue to do what you do now, you'll only suffer. You already gained extremely bad reputation and you continue to sink yourself in deeper and deeper. Try to understand Eve - it's not about some numbers and it cannot be won economically. That's the only thing you proved.But most probably you'll just keep doing what you do now. I predict some staged fights from you in the future. The question becomes - why? It won't make you a pvper, no matter if someone believes in it. What will you do when someone in a noobship kills your precious gank catalyst afterwards? Right now, you don't have the knowledge or skills to prevent that.

@Anonymous: if I'd care about being considered a PvP-er, I never talked about business, I'd do go to PvP like the PvP-ers and then fix up my killboard with faked kills. A missioner here, a ratter there, a hauler there. I could easily become a top PvP-er in the eyes of the public if I care. My point is that ANYONE can do that, so being "top PvP-er" is just as pointless as having the most pets in WoW.

"I'd do go to PvP like the PvP-ers and then fix up my killboard with faked kills"

For crying out loud - did you even read, what I posted instead of skimming through it? Pvp is not about "fixing killboards" - it is about fun in blowing things up and getting blown. Who cares how your killboard looks like? The point is about having fun and getting better at it. You WON'T get better at pvp by fixing your killboard. You will only be lying to yourself, as some random guy with a terrible KB will just blow you away and laugh at you after that. Where will all your isk be then? It surely won't save you.

"I could easily become a top PvP-er in the eyes of the public if I care. My point is that ANYONE can do that, so being "top PvP-er" is just as pointless as having the most pets in WoW."

And that just proves that you failed to understand what mm and Hans posted. You have your own definition of a "top pvper" that you measure by isk. Understand this: all your isk, all your ganks, all your fakes, all your experiments and schemes will not mean a thing when you fail real fights. This is a goal you cannot accomplish by your typical means. Skills cannot be bought - isk can only make you FAKE them. The longer you fail to realize it, the longer you fail at eve.

Anyone can do that in any game... Why do you think they had the "No communication with the other side" rule in the WoW EULA? Why do you think they initally had that you could not play both sides on a pvp server?

I agree with the other posters, you are burning out, or struggling to find what YOU, not anyone else, want to do within the sandbox. You have not yet got the idea of Eve...there is no endgame, there are no raids, you define your own game, you set the conditions by which you define winning.

So what if you padded your killboard? Are you claiming all PvPers are faking their kills because it is possible to do so?Are all market transactions done by bots because it is certainly possible to have a market bot.Are all miners bots, because there are a small number who are?

Gevlon, here is the main problem that people have with this post and with your previous triple Talos kill post:

Your hypothesis is clearly stated: ""elite PvP" is a joke and anyone and his mother can make awesome killmails."

What you have failed to do is supply evidence that supports this hypothesis. You have generated fake killmails but these kills are blatantly fake and wouldn't stand up to the scrutiny that a high-profile killmail is subjected to. In the case of the Talos killmails the victim was evidently your alt, as verifiable by the similar name, previous blog posts and testimony from TEST members and directors. In the case of this Carrier kill the damage you did was nowhere near sufficient to kill a carrier and yet you are alone on the KM.

In order to prove that there are no actual elite PvPers in EVE you need to provide evidence that all those considered to be elite PvPers are faking kills themselves, not merely that you can create them. In order to prove that "elite PvP" as a concept is a joke because it's possible to fake elite-looking kills you would need to provide an elite-looking kill, in other words one that is not obviously fake. Just providing a killmail of you taking out something expensive that has blatant inconsistencies as these do is not enough to support your hypothesis.

Your continued claim that many/all kills involving difficult matchups are fake because you have produced obviously faked killmails from unlikely fights is mostly only succeeding in undermining your own arguments at this point.

As an aside you probably shouldn't take the interview request from TMC as support for "how seriously people take "l33t killz"" as you put it - TMC do a regular feature called ALOD, or Awful Loss Of the Day, not looking at "l33t killz" but at terrible losses. In order to produce this, TMC editors look for killmails that show particularly unusual losses, ideally including bad fitting on the losses. In this case a travel-fit Chimera with empty highs and an almost empty Dronebay being killed by a lone Tengu would definitely fit the bill. They then contact those involved in the kill to get the details. I could be wrong, but it seems far more likely to me that the mail you had was for a potential ALOD article not to celebrate your entry into the leet-PvPers hall of fame.

Incidentally, you might want to bear in mind that a KM on its own is never an example of elite PvP; the difference between an awful loss and an elite kill is usually in the circumstances involved (was the victim a PLEX warrior who had no idea how to fly their massively pimped ship, or were they a veteran solo player who knew how to leverage every tiny % bonus from their billions of ISK in fittings, for example). If you can't provide "some "l33t" story" then you're never going to be able to demonstrate that your fake kills are as valid as any "elite" kill and prove your hypothesis. Note that both TMC's ALOD articles and Jester's Kill of the Week articles both include details on how a kill happened, not merely a simple KB link or repost.

@Gevlon Your problem is that you're fighting a strawman of mostly your own design. Yes, some people have elitist 'leet' attitudes and aren't above killboard fixing - but as Steel H. rightly says, such people are also relentlessly mocked for it.

And I think you are also confusing 'thinking economically' with 'using ISK as only tool and measurement'. The comments on this very post prove that paying ISK for a staged fight is not sufficient to be recognized as PvPer.

You could have had a field day putting a typical PvP fight into economical terms: the 'opportunity cost' of hunting an elusive, seemingly 'high-margin' target while neglecting 'low-margin' ones; the whole question of how to assign 'value', which is dependent on your target market (fight objective); the question of 'cost of business', namely what ships to bring and possibly lose; and possibly even more.

And that is before even going into economical warfare itself (like the situation where an alliance was triggered into into failure by an hostile public audit of its finances).

@Hivemind: my fake kills are obvious because I neither bothered to make them look less obvious, nor I can because I'm not a PvP-er. If I wanted to, I'd join with an unrelated alt to a PvP corp, roam and so, to learn it at least to an average level, and then I could simply recreate kills that are considered "l33t".

Eve is a game of many mini-games or games within a game. PI is a mini-game. Station trading is a mini-game. And PvP combat is a mini game. And there is skill and knowledge involved in these minigames (to varying degrees ofc). As you well know, you can be a good trader who knows what's up or a bad one who 0.01s to get a sale every two weeks.

There is skill in PvP. It seems as if you don't think this is true, and it makes you seem...uninformed.

For example, catching and killing a moving interceptor with a t1 frig is damn hard to do. You are both moving so fast, that everything has to be done nigh perfectly. You have to overheat, you have to point/scram and turn it off at the right time. If you scrammed, you have to lower your speed or you'll overshoot and lose him. You have to keep in mind your tranversal and adjust depending on what kind of guns you are using. If you are using short range guns, staying within optimal will prove very hard. You have to repair and overheat and so on. All of this happening in a time window of seconds.

On a knowledge level, you have to have a good fit and know what kind of fits he is likely to have. You have to know the strengths and weaknesses of those fits.

If you're trying to talk shit about poeple who pad and then brag about their killboard, knock yourself out (although I'm not sure why you'd care).

PvP for a lot of people, dare I say most, is about the thrill of the fight itself, not about the kb or isk efficiency. The feeling of winning a fight against the odds. I know you have expressed disdain for PvP solo and small gang roaming as happens daily in lowsec and NPC null. The dynamic is very different from large sov blob fights. But you really should try it out, it can be quite enjoyable.

Again it's another game, more akin to an RTS almost. It's not for everybody, but there is no reason to shit on it.

I am a big fan and your trading posts are a big inspiration to a relative newbie such as myself. But I'm pretty disappointed by this post.

I'll leave you with this incredible clip, it should speak louder than any words: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7F1zRd2UwI&t=8m35s.

You claim you could do this, but you can't prove it - until you can, your claims that some/all PvPers are buffing their KBs with faked kills are unsupported. That claim already fails Occam's razor - the idea that PvPers frequently add fake kills to their KBs without the practice being uncovered or leaked requires significantly more assumptions than the alternative, that some people are just very good at EVE PvP because they find it enjoyable and have invested a lot of time into it. Given that your claims lack definitive proof and require far more assumptions than the alternative, it's not really surprising that your claims have seen near-universal rejection.

You can prove that your hypothesis is correct either by creating a fake that cannot be detected as such without you revealing it or by proving that existing kills from recognised highly skilled PvPers are already fakes. Without doing either you can't support any of your claims about "elite PvP" or those who you consider to be the PvP elite, and bribing a Titan or Supercarrier pilot to let you kill them or whore on their suicide KM isn't going to change that.